Has something like this been tried? It may not be economically feasible for mass checking, but still be useful given that most GBA TASes uses older versions of VBA (and so likely won't sync).
So the Game Boy Player Player does allow controls coming from a realtime player to be played back through the console, and I could really easily add code for saving that to a VBM. This would, however, require that runners have modded Game Boy Players. Alternatively, the Game Boy Interface that Extrems made might be a more viable option, since that only requires soft mods.
E] "Instructions" for modding a Game Boy Player are available, and I could make more specific instructions. I'd like to do a rev 2 that's a bit cleaner, and uh...connects a few more pins ;) but that's not a short term goal.
I have this feedback after using 0.3-2378-7fb1b90 (branch: master), most of which is just minor details/personal usability nitpicks:
- I would like the default window size to be smaller (2x)
- I noticed the mouse cursor sometimes disappears when clicking on mgba and its menu. I wish that the mouse cursor is always visible unless you go fullscreen.
I can see that the intention was for the cursor to hide after 1 second but it sometimes doesn't work as intended:
-- When clicking on one main menu and then hovering onto another, the cursor disappears.
-- When no game is loaded, the cursor disappears as soon as you hover on the logo.
- The gamepad config ("Remap keyboard...") graphic doesn't tell what is A, B, Start and Select so it is a guessing game what you're configuring.
- I would prefer if the "About" menu option was in its own menu "Help".
- When the game is paused and mgba isn't in focus, and then comes into focus again, the current frame isn't displayed.
http://i.imgur.com/JCFFazf.png
Also:
-- When quicksaving a savestate while the game is paused, it will not show the "State saved" text.
- I can't set Ctrl as my fast-forward hotkey.
- There are 1~3 delay frames in mgba compared to VBA. (I tested by enabling background input in VBA and walking through the same room on both emulators at the same time, but I have already noticed it before testing.) This affects gameplay experience; emulator speedrunners will not be able to play to the best of their ability.
- I would like it if there was a quickstate hotkey 10. Right now there is 1~9, but if it went from 1~10 I could use the 10th hotkey on the number 0 on my keyboard. If you know what I mean.
Otherwise, looking pretty good.
EDIT:
- The window size preference and the gamepad config ("Remap keyboard...") preference isn't saved when exiting mgba. I have to set those everytime I open mgba.
Most of these are either known problems, or things I would consider bugs, so I'm working on fixing them. The default window size is SUPPOSED to be 2x, and it is SUPPOSED to be remembered. This is probably the same problem, where it's not properly setting it on startup. What OS are you on?
The missing cursor has been a known bug for a while, but I haven't had a chance to debug it yet.
I added some text to the remap keyboard dialog yesterday. It should be much easier now.
The focus and savestate-when-paused issues are it just not redrawing when it probably should. I fixed the latter last night, the former should be easy to fix tonight.
A help menu would be nice if I had other things to put in it. At the moment I don't, and someone told me that if I added a separate menu, it would suddenly be too many menus at 1x. Not sure there's an optimal solution for this one.
Modifiers as hotkeys being broken is Qt's fault. I've done some fairly extensive changes to fix this, but it's not on the main branch due to being fairly extensive. I'll merge it onto master for 0.4, but it won't be in 0.3 unless I can prove that it's stable.
Input delays on keyboard are thing JMC47 also reported. It's some combination of actual frame delays (try setting audio buffer samples as low as you can without audio glitching), and Qt's event system not being tuned for realtime. I've been trying to fix the former for quite a while, but the latter I'm not sure I can fix. Supposedly joysticks work fine.
The reason there's no quicksave 10 is mostly for UX reasons and not for technical reasons. The savestate UI is tuned for 9, as are the filenames. I might be able to add the option to just have additional ones if the player desires additional, but I'm not 100% sure.
I have NO idea why keyboard configs are disappearing. I've never seen that before.
All in all, 0.3 is coming out soon but the more people report things, the more I wonder if I should keep delaying it.
E] Fixed the cursor and (probably) the focus issues, will be in the 2015-08-05 build in a few hours. Let me know!
(try setting audio buffer samples as low as you can without audio glitching)
I have set it to 512 (the lowest) and I have tried muting the audio in the settings but it seems the issue is still present. I have not tried changing other settings. You wrote about Qt, but the display driver I used was "OpenGL" and not "Software(Qt)".
E] Fixed the cursor and (probably) the focus issues, will be in the 2015-08-05 build in a few hours. Let me know!
I will check it and edit this post.
---
More 0.3-2378-7fb1b90 (branch: master) 2015-08-02 feedback:
- When muting or unmuting the audio opening the settings and closing them without even changing them, the FPS is suddenly in the hundreds and needs to be manually set to 60 again.
- Targeting a certain FPS (such as 60) doesn't seem to work when neither sync to audio nor sync to video is enabled.
Qt is what the whole GUI is written in, it's not just a setting. There just happens to be a way to plaster the pixels on the screen using Qt directly instead of OpenGL, which you should not actually use. That doesn't change the fact that it's still Qt through and through.
Also I'm going to try to fix the frame delay issues once and for all tomorrow.
E]
- Targeting a certain FPS (such as 60) doesn't seem to work when neither sync to audio nor sync to video is enabled.
This isn't a bug. With nothing to sync to, there's nothing to control the framerate, so it just pours out frames as fast as possible. Perhaps not the most intuitive, but without something to sync to, there's nothing to throttle it.
Instead of editing my previous post, I thought it has become a bit of a mess so I'm making a new post.
I checked 0.3-2383-a6ff9f6 (branch: master). This build is from 2015-08-04, instead of 2015-08-05, so I don't know if all your changes have gone live.
The savestate text while the game is paused is fixed.
The cursor hiding and other focus issues (such as in the image I linked previously) are not fixed.
Btw, as for Mario & Luigi Peach speech glitch, I might make a comparison video between mgba and gameboy player.
The cursor issue is fixed two commits after that version, so that build is too old. New build (most likely 0.3-2392-742296b) goes up in a few hours still. Hoping this build fixes the window size issues, too.
Today I have checked for updated versions.
mGBA-nightly-2015-08-05-win32-742296b8b9e3bec29ff16c0c1553d7e5c337ca2d :
- "Remap keyboard" config is still not saved
- There are still some focus-related issues, but negligible ones...
When moving another window on top of mgba, mgba's screen may turn white instead of showing the current frame.
When opening menu after menu in mgba, the screen isn't updated inbetween. When moving mgba's window offscreen and then back, the current frame isn't shown either.
The latter two can be seen here http://i.imgur.com/KkL9gJE.png
- cursor issue seems fixed. Delay issue might be fixed but I can't really say. The test I ran today looked better than before but I still feel like there could be delay..
- Setting Ctrl or alt in the "remap keyboard" config gives a weird glitched text http://i.imgur.com/9yZ9pAd.png
New update is out. (0.3.0) Going to try it out.
I'm guessing endrift forgot to mention an update here.
EDIT:
I just used the default settings (as in, extracting from the compressed files straight from the Downloads link).
I can't seem to remind multiple times when constantly pressing or holding down the Rewind hotkey. It was able to rewind up to 1 frame, and then it couldn't rewind further frames.
EDIT 2:
So, it's currently impossible to rewind frames without mGBA playing continuously to the next frame? I was expecting that pausing the game and then rewinding/stepping backwards would be able to continue backwards. Guess it needs a ton of savestate buffers...
Oof, that's a bug then. Thanks for catching that, I'll fix it.
E] Oh wait, I misread. If you use held-rewind it goes back one interval at a time. However, at the moment, pressing rewind goes all the way back. I'll fix that when I revamp rewind in 0.4
Sometimes, the video feed just seems to freeze for a couple of seconds, with the sound still going. I don't recall this happening in 0.2 or pre-0.3 nightly builds. I'm using the OpenGL backend on Windows 7 x64, by the way.
EDIT: It doesn't appear to happen when I use the software renderer.
Anyway, coming back to this:
fsvgm777 wrote:
Another thing I noticed in mGBA in this particular game is that sometimes, a sound effect doesn't play at all (unless it's a side effect of the sound restoration patch that I used, but it doesn't seem to happen in the both VBA flavours I tested, though I'll test on the regular version to confirm). I have a recording ready, if you need it (which, by the way, works pretty well now).
I've now had this happen on the unpatched European release (that is, without the sound restoration patch)...though, upon closer listening, it seems like a specific sound channel doesn't play at all at random. Unfortunately, I don't have a recording ready yet.
EDIT 2: Here are two recordings showcasing the sound issue. (yes, the game is in French (I chose for it to be in French), but that's beside the point)
After mucking around a bit, it seems the issue is with sound channel 4. Note that sound channel 4 was enabled at all times in these two recordings.
I wasn't sure if to post this here or in bizhawk topic:
Is the mgba core in bizhawk good to use? Or should I wait?
Well, I made a full TAS of Fairly OddParents using that core and it synced, but I'm not so sure about a game like Mario & Luigi... But I'm no expert in that regard.
I believed that has nothing to do with mGBA, but rather how Bizhawk handles save states among different cores.
(Also, your link made my browser jump at different positions, so I don't know if you're referring to the save state issue, or something else. Perhaps re-link to the issue via direct link on Github?)
I'm not sure if it's this emulator core's fault or Bizhawk, but on version 1.11.1, the game SpongeBob SquarePants - Lights, Camera, Pants! simply shows a black screen on the mGBA core. It works on vba and gba-next however.
In one of the older nightly versions, 0.4-2646-afb29ae, I have encountered a problem.
My cursor would turn invisible pretty much for as long as mgba was running. I could see it again when I paused it. I was livestreaming with OBS, but I think I had no other programs open that would have interfered with the emulator.
Not sure if this happens in the newer versions. I'm just saying, in case it's a problem with running OBS and mGBA at the same time.
Also, maybe we can rename the topic to reflect that this is "mGBA" discussion.
Dragonball Z Legacy of Goku 2's sleep mode (which can be accessed from ingame) seems to cause strange behavior. When it activates, mGBA will not show a white screen like VBA, but will show the mGBA logo.
You are supposed to hold L+R+Select to wake from sleep mode, but doing so on the logo screen does not let me awake. When going to recent ROMs and selecting the game again, it will awake mysteriously, with the onscreen message "Loaded suspend state".
In one of the older nightly versions, 0.4-2646-afb29ae, I have encountered a problem.
My cursor would turn invisible pretty much for as long as mgba was running. I could see it again when I paused it. I was livestreaming with OBS, but I think I had no other programs open that would have interfered with the emulator.
Not sure if this happens in the newer versions. I'm just saying, in case it's a problem with running OBS and mGBA at the same time.
Also, maybe we can rename the topic to reflect that this is "mGBA" discussion.
That's kind of intentional, although the cursor is supposed to come back whenever you move the mouse. If it's not...that must mean that something is stealing the cursor event I guess? Not really sure.
As for sleep mode, that's "intended" behavior insofar as I wasn't sure how to make that behave in an expected way, so when you enter sleep mode, it takes a savestate and exits the game. The savestate is then automatically loaded and deleted the next time you start the game. Which is admittedly very confusing and I knew it would be, I just wasn't sure how to make it not-confusing. I remember getting very confused with what VBA did.
It basically turns off all the hardware and waits for an interrupt to occur. It disables all the interrupts except for keypad interrupts, so it waits until you press a combination of keypresses. I COULD implement this, but it would be a bit confusing to use.
MUGG wrote:
Would it be possible to take a savestate in the standalone with the latest nightly to see if I can look into it? It'd make things a lot more convenient for me.
I COULD implement this, but it would be a bit confusing to use.
Perhaps it would be, but it would be the correct emulation.
http://www.mediafire.com/view/qymjk11l13b3xk2/0434%20-%20Dragon%20Ball%20Z%20-%20The%20Legacy%20of%20Goku%20%28U%29.ss1#
Here is a savestate.
Edit:
Looks like the (E) version of DBZ Legacy of Goku crashes bizhawk(mgba core) on the intro movie, and on the movie that plays after you finish the planet Kai portion of the game.
It crashes on the latest standalone nightly as well for me.
I'm going to wait for endrift's enhancement with which I can see if my ROM is clean.
